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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe the activity on this repo is legitimate by any means.

The whole repo must be absolutely swarming with agents, just look at the sheer rate of issues and pull requests. There was 6 new PRs in the last 10 minutes at the time of writing. It's not much of a stretch to assume the stars are also inorganic.

Every other minute some bots is creating an issue that a bot is trying to solve via a pull request which is reviewed by multiple bots. Future is now, good luck and have fun.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot stamping LGTM! :sparkles: :rocket: on a pull request - forever.

This repo is a big stitches

Geniune online user sentiment has died out a long time ago. If you're still basing any opinion or decision on what other "people" voted or commented online, you're easy prey for the algorithmic manipulation machine.

in a way, the death of genuine reviews online may be a great way to bring it back to real life at a more realistic scale

This is an along the same lines as the idea that every email should cost a penny. Like if every up vote or down vote cost a penny.

I don’t think it would fix things, except raise the bar for what is shilled and what isn’t.

I think that would only make it worse. Most genuine people won't care enough to spend money on this kind of service, while corpos would jump on it immediately and buy thousands of votes for a couple of dollars.

IIRC openclaw will star the project automatically on setup

if this is true, it must be against GitHub's ToS, right?

I'm sure it would be if it were explicitly instructed to leave a star.

If not explicitly prompted by the install process then it becomes another case study in AI accountability washing.

I opened Openclaw on github and was shocked it was already starred. Somehow i did it and can't even remember why or when even though i have a very low opinion of this app.

They probably used a claw to increase the ranking.

Yeah, the Claws are starring the repo, obviously.

That's a lot of Claws in any case.

Many other projects would have gamed the star-count if it was possible to do at scale without GitHub removing them for fraud as they often do.

Agents will dominate the internet and open source code in a few years.

I'm convinced more than 50% of "human" web traffic is already automated, blog posts, comments, social media, &c.

"Dead Internet Theory" is, even if it wasn't real 5 years ago, now hyperstitioned into truthfulness as the days go on.

Bonus for the use of the word "hyperstition". :)

By design, with llm agents and all, surely not

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